--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is very Sean. This is very Sean-coated. Gucci loafers. Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you, whether that's from an in-store stylist or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see. They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The titanium Apple Card is no different. It's laser etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Netflix's hottest show is Squid Game. It's got everything. Pink stormtroopers, hundreds of people in matching tracksuits, honeycomb shape cutting, and a giant animatronic robot girl who will have you shot if you move out of turn.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, and this Korean drama just became the biggest series launch in the history of the platform. It is about a group of heavily indebted South Koreans who are sort of tricked into participating into this survival game where they show up and they're told they're going to have a chance to win money and it's going to be a series of challenges.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Here is the first game. You will be playing Red Light, Green Light. But at the start of the first challenge, more than half of them get killed. Green light! Red light! Player 324, eliminated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then they briefly decide to leave this game because they are scared out of their minds, but then upon going back to their own lives, ultimately decide that trying to compete and win money is better than the sad state of their lives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Come on, let's finish this thing. I'd rather stay and keep on trying in here than go back to the bullshit out there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is very much about capitalism, class, inequality, and that is a recurring theme not only in this show, but I think in a lot of the entertainment that's very popular right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lucas Shaw has been reporting on Squid Game for Bloomberg. So Squid Game has had the most successful debut in the history of Netflix. They released a stat on Tuesday saying that 111 million people had watched the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think the first 25 days, for context, the most popular show before that was Bridgerton. My name is Lady Whistledown. You do not know me, but I know you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which had 82 million people. So this is the most popular debut in Netflix's history by like an order of magnitude.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And needless to say, no one saw this coming. Nobody saw it coming because, one, there's never been a show, I think, that's reached that many people that quickly in the world before.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And certainly there's never been a show from South Korea that reached close to that many people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I like to think that a lot of the Netflix shows are sort of accidental successes. Many of the most popular ones have caught the company by surprise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this one is a whole other level. You know, Netflix tends to not invest a lot or sort of push its hits until after they come out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's very different from how Hollywood traditionally markets it, where they sort of pick their hits in advance and they spend a ton of money to market it to make it a hit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Netflix tends to let the people decide what's popular, and then when something is popular, they sort of pour gasoline all over it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's definitely what's happened in the case of Squid Game, where, you know, within a week or two of it being released, all of a sudden they're selling Squid Game t-shirts and trying to figure out Squid Game Halloween costumes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What are the Squid Game Halloween costumes? To be honest, I haven't seen them yet, but I have to imagine they are coming.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anyone who's seen the show knows that there's these characters in it who are dressed in like red jumpsuits with masks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That seems like bound to be some kind of Halloween costume. So a bunch of people this Halloween season will be buying costumes to celebrate a show about the perils of capitalism?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that's the hope, right? I mean, Netflix wants to set that up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Netflix has made a major investment in trying to figure out consumer products and merchandise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if it doesn't happen, I still think it's a missed opportunity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Perfect.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How did a Korean sci-fi show become the biggest show in the world in like a couple weeks? It speaks to the biggest impact that Netflix has had on pop culture all around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which is, you know, previously you'd have a show that got really popular in the U.S. or for like NCIS most popular show in the U.S.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What makes NCIS the number one show on television?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have a list if you interested Evil perps big slurps
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Over the course of a couple of years it might become popular in France and Germany and some other places, but it had to be released kind of slowly and systematically.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or the opposite of it, you'd have a show that's really popular in Korea or Japan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then what would probably happen is someone in the U.S. would decide to make an English language version of that show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so people in the U.S. would never even see that. But Netflix has flipped this whole dynamic on its head where it will take shows from all over the world and release them all over the world at once.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think that's the most basic shift. And really, since 2014, 2015, Netflix has been investing more and more in original programs from outside the U.S., original programs in foreign languages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It really started with shows in Spanish from Mexico and in Portuguese from Brazil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's made shows in France and Germany. In the past few years, it started to make more from places like India and Korea and Japan because, you know, Netflix is trying to make shows that are popular in potential areas of growth, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And most of its growth in recent years has been outside of the U.S.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One byproduct of that is that because it still has such a huge audience in the U.S. and Europe, it has tried to make it so that people in those markets want to watch all of these shows it's making from other countries where they previously hadn't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's the kind of the foundational layer for this. We've seen, especially over the past couple of years, a growing number of international hits blow up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's how I started calling myself Tokyo. The one looking at my ass is Berlin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A wanted man all over the world. La Casa de Papel, Money Heist from Spain, I think was the first truly massive hit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then just earlier this year, we had Lupin, which was a show from France, which had the second biggest debut of any show in Netflix history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know the handcuff trick? The handcuff what? Well, now you know it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hey, guard, we're finished. Now third because of what Squid Game has done.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In terms of its specific appeal and sort of how that happened, the show exploded, I'd say, three or four days after it was released.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It wasn't instantaneous, but as it started to grow in popularity in Korea and across Asia and then eventually in the U.S., it just had this snowball effect, which often happens with Netflix, where, you know, people start talking about it and because it's available everywhere and because everyone seems to have Netflix, it just goes crazy viral and something goes from being watched by a small subset of people to being watched by everyone in a way that really few other TV networks can make happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's to say even if the show is in a foreign language.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, well, there's two dynamics to that. I think that because Netflix and YouTube and other global services have familiarized more people with watching and listening to things in other languages, there are more people doing that in general, using subtitles, for example.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Netflix has also invested a lot of money in dubbing, whereby you have voice actors re-record what's happening in different languages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I haven't seen any data released by Netflix, but I would imagine that there are a lot of people who are watching Squid Game in English, and it's dubbed for them, or in whatever the language is in their local country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because in Europe, for example, dubbing has always been more popular. And so I would imagine that there are a bunch of people in England, France, Spain, watching it in their native tongue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's safe to assume that 80 to 90 percent of the people are watching it dubbed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The U.S. has always been more of a subtitle market.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that balance has begun to shift, but the majority of people here tend to still watch with subtitles.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I go subtitles. How about you?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have gone subtitles for the first couple of episodes, but if I'm watching a foreign language show at the end of a long workday and my brain is tired, I am not above dubbing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fair.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Obviously, this is not the only Korean culture that sort of struck gold worldwide.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, it's really remarkable to watch the impact that Korean entertainment has had on a global level over the last decade.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Something that they started investing in really in the mid-90s, something called the Hallyu, which I'm sure someone who actually speaks Korean would tell me I just butchered that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this kind of Korean wave where there are a bunch of media companies, specifically then kind of music management companies, that tried to develop these pop acts that would travel the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think now most people are familiar at the very least with BTS.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: K-pop has become along with, I'd say, reggaeton, like one of the two big global genres that has spread everywhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then Korean TV has taken a little bit longer, but it is now probably the most popular genre across a lot of Southeast Asia, a lot of East Asia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you have streaming services going into those countries and trying to sign up customers, they're often relying on licensing Korean TV or commissioning original K-dramas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even in the US, we had sort of a niche service called Drama Fever that caters to people who love that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this is the first Korean TV show, I would say, to break out in a big way in the West.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we think that the immense success of Squid Game will change how entertainment companies strategize the way they think about foreign stuff?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or has that change already taken place?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That change is in process, I would say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, Netflix has been far and away the most aggressive company at investing in programming in other languages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You look at some of the other global streaming services whether it Disney Plus or HBO Max Apple TV Plus they all planning to do it or are doing it but on a smaller scale partially because their audience is still more concentrated in the U and Western Europe
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it is inevitable over time that all of these companies are going to be trying to find big hits in Korea, both because Korea is such a strong market for their streaming services and because those Korean programs will help them unlock customers across a lot of the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, how much remains to be seen, but we're going to see, you know, millions of dollars flow from American companies into Korea to try to find the next Squid Game.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cool.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I will watch it with subtitles.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I'll watch it however my brain decides is best for me that day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Chime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Chime gets that, says Chime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not all journalism is the same.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Take The Guardian.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our coverage has something unique.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fierce independence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're free to report the whole picture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Expose corruption wherever we find it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And give fresh perspective on everything.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Green light. Red light.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kyung Kim is a professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm also author of Hegemonic Mimicry, Korean Popular Culture of the 21st Century.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he did not have the same initial reaction a lot of people around the world are having to Squid Game.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hwang Dong-hyuk and I, the creator of the show, I mean, we're the same age.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so these are the same type of games that I used to play when I was in Korea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is kind of a nostalgic home, and that's why I was really, really frustrated and actually devastated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How could you turn this to the sweet memories of mine and nostalgic dreams that I had of my homeland into this bloody, ruthless, violent, merciless thing?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's not what the game was about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But by the time he finished the series, he had decided there was more to it than blood and gore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's set against the background of the harsh realities of neoliberal capitalism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's one of the, I think, appealing draw to the show, that it talks about harsh realities before it goes on to this kind of, you know, happy, creepy kind of dystopian, you know, space of an island.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this is after, like, the last Korean thing that everyone watched, Parasite, was also about gross income inequality in South Korea, the haves and the have-nots.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a story about family.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The son goes into a rich house as a tutor and the story unfolds from there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just a funny and scary movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is this just a dominant theme in a lot of Korean popular culture or just the stuff that's making it over to North America and the rest of the West?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think Korean cinema has a tradition of actually being socially engaged over the last 20, 30 years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Korean society, after it opened up, democracy after 1980s, have really specialized in making socially engaged films.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, those of you who actually know Korea from K-drama and K-pop would hardly think and conceptualize, well, you know, that's not the Korea I know in popular culture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Korean cinema, where Squid Game also comes from, it's more of a cinema tradition that actually has influenced the making of Squid Game rather than Korean television.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's definitely been more socially committed kind of content that has specialized over the last 20, 30 years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For people who aren't familiar with the realities on the ground in South Korea, what's the economic inequality like there?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How bad is it? I'm sure Americans listening to this are pretty familiar with how bad it is here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Remember Korea had sunk into world worst poverty after the Korean War in the 1950s and 60s
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It did rebound 70s and 80s and that created one of the world most famous economic miracle stories
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In order to spur economic growth, the military regime founded the Economic Planning Board, giving it unprecedented powers for planning, allocating the budget, and for attracting foreign capital.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, if you look at just pure GDP numbers and the export capital, You know, Korea is right up there in almost every economic index.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the other side of the coin is it has really, over the last 20 years especially, after what is called the IMF crisis of 1997, when the IMF had to bail Korean economy out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hit hard by the Asian financial crisis, South Korea's government asked the IMF for a $58 billion bailout.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bailout.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It really did push out, I think, the backbone of Korean economy and social strata.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's the middle class.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The country wasted no time getting to work on paying it back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Millions donated precious family heirlooms to be melted into gold bars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It has been non-stop ever since.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's one of the countries that, yes, you have high economic markers, but, you know, Underneath it all is the world's suicide rate, top 10.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Unfortunately, the world's lowest fertility rate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All of those things add up, making it really grim and bleak for many of the young peoples out there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there something specific to Korean culture that makes, I don't know, like financial struggle, something that might lead to suicidal ideation?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Debt is synonymous with shame.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And sure, I think there is family shame in many Asian countries, which tend to be more community-based and family-based than maybe individual-based Western countries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the Neo-Confusion idea still holds very true in Korea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as you have seen also in Squid Game, that's where it begins, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, Giyon, the protagonist, he steals it from his, you know, septuagenarian mother.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Huh? Pin number changed on you, huh?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Guess your mother finally abandoned you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hold on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How creepy is that, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so that pressure, I think, is probably more acutely felt.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That sense of, again, guilt and shame that arises out of being burdened with debt.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think these profound works of culture, of entertainment have moved the needle and made it okay to be in this struggle for Koreans, like Parasite or Squid Game?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, but it does reflect present, you know, society mood and the sentiments, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And these works actually do resonate with many, many Koreans out there who feel just as baffled and frustrated as, you know, I mean, Ki-won does, the main protagonist, as well as the Kim family from Parasite.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so a lot of people empathize with these stories.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And voila, you not only have Koreans, obviously, empathizing with these characters, but worldwide audiences.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Oscar goes to Parasite.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think shows like these change how we feel about capitalism, or do they just sort of keep us entertained and primed for even more capitalism, you know, to renew our Netflix subscription or to go out and buy a pair of Vans because all the main characters in Squid Game are assigned Vans?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, or, you know, oh, that's my new Hollywood costume.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, exactly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which was the reaction that I had, of course.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there is enough comedy and enough, I guess, how can I say this, fantasy, you know, elements that are out there to mitigate that kind of a feeling of, oh, this feels awful.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, like I've got the same kind of credit card debt, you know, $50,000 or student debt that I can't pay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I think it still starts us to talk about as a global and conscientious citizens, if you will, you know, enable us to think about and conceptualize even however unrealistic those frames are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To provide a certain kind of talking point among us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And certainly that's what power of cultural contents or, you know, good movie ought to bring out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kiyong Kim is a professor at the University of California, Irvine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's also the author of the Zoom play, The Mask Debate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lucas Shaw, who you heard from earlier in the show, is an entertainment reporter for Bloomberg.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's also got a newsletter. It's called Screen Time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find a link to it on his Twitter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's at Lucas underscore Shaw.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is at today underscore explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's at Miles underscore underscore Bryan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm at Ramos for him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No underscores.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But maybe Miles will let me borrow one of his.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Squid Game has had the most successful debut in the history of Netflix. They released a stat on Tuesday saying that 111 million people had watched the show.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And I think the first 25 days, for context, the most popular show before that was Bridgerton.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: My name is Lady Whistledown. You do not know me, but I know you.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Which had 82 million people.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: So this is the most popular debut in Netflix's history by like an order of magnitude.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And needless to say, no one saw this coming.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Nobody saw it coming because, one, there's never been a show, I think, that's reached that many people that quickly in the world before.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And certainly there's never been a show from South Korea that reached close to that many people.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: I like to think that a lot of the Netflix shows are sort of accidental successes.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Many of the most popular ones have caught the company by surprise.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: But this one is a whole other level.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: You know, Netflix tends to not invest a lot or sort of push its hits until after they come out.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: It's very different from how Hollywood traditionally markets it, where they sort of pick their hits in advance and they spend a ton of money to market it to make it a hit.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Netflix tends to let the people decide what's popular, and then when something is popular, they sort of pour gasoline all over it.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And that's definitely what's happened in the case of Squid Game, where, you know, within a week or two of it being released, all of a sudden they're selling Squid Game t-shirts and trying to figure out Squid Game Halloween costumes.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: What are the Squid Game Halloween costumes? To be honest, I haven't seen them yet, but I have to imagine they are coming.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Anyone who's seen the show knows that there's these characters in it who are dressed in like red jumpsuits with masks.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: That seems like bound to be some kind of Halloween costume.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: So a bunch of people this Halloween season will be buying costumes to celebrate a show about the perils of capitalism?
--:-- Lucas Shaw: I think that's the hope, right? I mean, Netflix wants to set that up.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Netflix has made a major investment in trying to figure out consumer products and merchandise.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: But if it doesn't happen, I still think it's a missed opportunity.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Perfect.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: How did a Korean sci-fi show become the biggest show in the world in like a couple weeks? It speaks to the biggest impact that Netflix has had on pop culture all around the world.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Which is, you know, previously you'd have a show that got really popular in the U.S. or for like NCIS most popular show in the U.S.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: What makes NCIS the number one show on television?
--:-- Lucas Shaw: I have a list if you interested Evil perps big slurps
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Over the course of a couple of years it might become popular in France and Germany and some other places, but it had to be released kind of slowly and systematically.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Or the opposite of it, you'd have a show that's really popular in Korea or Japan.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And then what would probably happen is someone in the U.S. would decide to make an English language version of that show.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And so people in the U.S. would never even see that. But Netflix has flipped this whole dynamic on its head where it will take shows from all over the world and release them all over the world at once.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: So I think that's the most basic shift.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And really, since 2014, 2015, Netflix has been investing more and more in original programs from outside the U.S., original programs in foreign languages.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: It really started with shows in Spanish from Mexico and in Portuguese from Brazil.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: It's made shows in France and Germany. In the past few years, it started to make more from places like India and Korea and Japan because, you know, Netflix is trying to make shows that are popular in potential areas of growth, right?
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And most of its growth in recent years has been outside of the U.S.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: One byproduct of that is that because it still has such a huge audience in the U.S. and Europe, it has tried to make it so that people in those markets want to watch all of these shows it's making from other countries where they previously hadn't.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And that's the kind of the foundational layer for this.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: We've seen, especially over the past couple of years, a growing number of international hits blow up.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And that's how I started calling myself Tokyo. The one looking at my ass is Berlin.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: A wanted man all over the world. La Casa de Papel, Money Heist from Spain, I think was the first truly massive hit.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: But then just earlier this year, we had Lupin, which was a show from France, which had the second biggest debut of any show in Netflix history.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: You know the handcuff trick? The handcuff what? Well, now you know it.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Hey, guard, we're finished. Now third because of what Squid Game has done.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: In terms of its specific appeal and sort of how that happened, the show exploded, I'd say, three or four days after it was released.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: It wasn't instantaneous, but as it started to grow in popularity in Korea and across Asia and then eventually in the U.S., it just had this snowball effect, which often happens with Netflix, where, you know, people start talking about it and because it's available everywhere and because everyone seems to have Netflix, it just goes crazy viral and something goes from being watched by a small subset of people to being watched by everyone in a way that really few other TV networks can make happen.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And that's to say even if the show is in a foreign language.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Yeah, well, there's two dynamics to that. I think that because Netflix and YouTube and other global services have familiarized more people with watching and listening to things in other languages, there are more people doing that in general, using subtitles, for example.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: But Netflix has also invested a lot of money in dubbing, whereby you have voice actors re-record what's happening in different languages.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: And so I haven't seen any data released by Netflix, but I would imagine that there are a lot of people who are watching Squid Game in English, and it's dubbed for them, or in whatever the language is in their local country.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: Because in Europe, for example, dubbing has always been more popular. And so I would imagine that there are a bunch of people in England, France, Spain, watching it in their native tongue.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: It's safe to assume that 80 to 90 percent of the people are watching it dubbed.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: The U.S. has always been more of a subtitle market.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: I think that balance has begun to shift, but the majority of people here tend to still watch with subtitles.
--:-- Lucas Shaw: I go subtitles. How about you?
--:-- Lucas Shaw: I have gone subtitles for the first couple of episodes, but if I'm watching a foreign language show at the end of a long workday and my brain is tired, I am not above dubbing.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Korean cinema has a tradition of actually being socially engaged over the last 20, 30 years.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Korean society, after it opened up, democracy after 1980s, have really specialized in making socially engaged films.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Now, those of you who actually know Korea from K-drama and K-pop would hardly think and conceptualize, well, you know, that's not the Korea I know in popular culture.
--:-- Kyung Kim: But Korean cinema, where Squid Game also comes from, it's more of a cinema tradition that actually has influenced the making of Squid Game rather than Korean television.
--:-- Kyung Kim: It's definitely been more socially committed kind of content that has specialized over the last 20, 30 years.
--:-- Kyung Kim: For people who aren't familiar with the realities on the ground in South Korea, what's the economic inequality like there?
--:-- Kyung Kim: How bad is it? I'm sure Americans listening to this are pretty familiar with how bad it is here.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Remember Korea had sunk into world worst poverty after the Korean War in the 1950s and 60s
--:-- Kyung Kim: It did rebound 70s and 80s and that created one of the world most famous economic miracle stories
--:-- Kyung Kim: In order to spur economic growth, the military regime founded the Economic Planning Board, giving it unprecedented powers for planning, allocating the budget, and for attracting foreign capital.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Now, if you look at just pure GDP numbers and the export capital, You know, Korea is right up there in almost every economic index.
--:-- Kyung Kim: But the other side of the coin is it has really, over the last 20 years especially, after what is called the IMF crisis of 1997, when the IMF had to bail Korean economy out.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Hit hard by the Asian financial crisis, South Korea's government asked the IMF for a $58 billion bailout.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Bailout.
--:-- Kyung Kim: It really did push out, I think, the backbone of Korean economy and social strata.
--:-- Kyung Kim: That's the middle class.
--:-- Kyung Kim: The country wasted no time getting to work on paying it back.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Millions donated precious family heirlooms to be melted into gold bars.
--:-- Kyung Kim: It has been non-stop ever since.
--:-- Kyung Kim: And it's one of the countries that, yes, you have high economic markers, but, you know, Underneath it all is the world's suicide rate, top 10.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Unfortunately, the world's lowest fertility rate.
--:-- Kyung Kim: All of those things add up, making it really grim and bleak for many of the young peoples out there.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Is there something specific to Korean culture that makes, I don't know, like financial struggle, something that might lead to suicidal ideation?
--:-- Kyung Kim: Debt is synonymous with shame.
--:-- Kyung Kim: And sure, I think there is family shame in many Asian countries, which tend to be more community-based and family-based than maybe individual-based Western countries.
--:-- Kyung Kim: But the Neo-Confusion idea still holds very true in Korea.
--:-- Kyung Kim: And as you have seen also in Squid Game, that's where it begins, right?
--:-- Kyung Kim: You know, Giyon, the protagonist, he steals it from his, you know, septuagenarian mother.
--:-- Kyung Kim: Huh? Pin number changed on you, huh?
--:-- Kyung Kim: Guess your mother finally abandoned you
